Edward W. Said

“Modern Orientalism embodies a systematic discipline of accumulation. Far from this being exclusively an intellectual or theoretical feature, it made Orientalism tend…

— Edward W. Said

“Not one of our political spokespeople—the same is true of the Arabs since Abdel Nasser’s time—ever speaks with self-respect and dignity of…

— Edward W. Said

“It remains the professional Orientalist's job to piece together a portrait, a restored picture as it were, of the Orient or the…

— Edward W. Said

“Intellectual representations are the activity itself, dependent on a kind of consciousness that is skeptical, engaged, unremittingly devote to rational investigation and…

— Edward W. Said

“Out of this unstable mix of technocracy and national security you have a nostalgia developing for colonialism or religion—atavistic in my opinion,…

— Edward W. Said

“Every writer on the Orient (and this is true even of Homer) assumes some Oriental precedent, some previous knowledge of the Orient,…

— Edward W. Said

“Music requires a particular type of education which is simply not given to most people. And, as a result, it’s set further…

— Edward W. Said

“No one today is purely one thing. Labels like Indian, or woman, or Muslim, or American are not more than starting-points, which…

— Edward W. Said

“They weren't like us and for that reason deserved to be ruled.”

— Edward W. Said

“Liberation as an intellectual mission, born in the resistance and opposition to the confinements and ravages of imperialism, has now shifted from…

— Edward W. Said

“Criticism must think of itself as life-enhancing and constitutively opposed to every form of tyranny, domination, and abuse; its social goals are…

— Edward W. Said

“The Orient is watched, since its almost (but never quite) offensive behavior issues out of a reservoir of infinite peculiarity; the European,…

— Edward W. Said

“There has been no major revolution in modern history without intellectuals; conversely there has been no major counterrevolutionary movement without intellectuals. Intellectuals…

— Edward W. Said

“Texts are not finished objects.”

— Edward W. Said

“Orientalism is after all a system for citing works and authors . __ Orientalism”

— Edward W. Said

“Every empire, however, tells itself and the world that it is unlike all other empires, that its mission is not to plunder…

— Edward W. Said

“In a sense the limitations of Orientalism are, as I said earlier, the limitations that follow upon disregarding, essentializing, denuding the humanity…

— Edward W. Said

“The intellectual is an individual endowed with a faculty for representing, embodying, articulating a message, a view, an attitude, philosophy or opinion…

— Edward W. Said

“Every single empire in its official discourse has said that it is not like all the others, that its circumstances are special,…

— Edward W. Said

“There is nothing mysterious or natural about authority. It is formed, irradiated, disseminated; it is instrumental, it is persuasive; it has status,…

— Edward W. Said

“The appropriation of history, the historicization of the past, the narrativization of society, all of which give the novel its force, include…

— Edward W. Said

“But, on the other hand, the study of music is one of the best ways to learn about human nature. This is…

— Edward W. Said